She reached for the memory and found air.
The specific shape of the knowledge was still there—she could feel the outline of it, the place in her mind where the information had sat, the structure of there was something here. The content was gone. What remained was the impression of weight without the weight itself, the way a shelf looks after everything has been removed from it.
Who told me this—
She couldn't finish the question. The who was exactly what was missing.
Tatsumaki's chest tightened. Her arms, already crossed, tightened further. The anger arrived clean and specific, the kind that came from understanding precisely what had been done to her even without knowing the content—because the shape of the theft was visible, and the shape was an insult.
Someone had taken something that belonged to her.
In the past, this moment—the moment when Tatsumaki reached her threshold—would have produced a response that people who worked in buildings wanted to be warned about in advance. The telekinetic energy would have gathered without conscious direction, the millions of tons of ambient psychic force that she could pull without thinking, the wall of green that turned the environment into an instrument.
She reached for it.
Nothing.
She reached again. The mental motion that had been as automatic as breathing since she was four years old produced exactly nothing. The white world absorbed the attempt and gave her silence back.
Tatsumaki lowered her hands and looked at them.
They were smaller than they should be.
The dress she'd been wearing—the floral one, City A evening wear—was gone. In its place, a lab coat, pale and institutional and exactly the kind of garment that you put on people when you want to make clear that they are subjects rather than persons.
And her hands. Her feet, bare on a surface that was cold in a way she was already beginning to recognize. Her whole frame reduced—not diminished, reversed—back to a size she'd been working to leave behind for twenty years.
I'm—
A voice. Male. Warm. Close enough to feel like it was coming from inside her own head.
Come back, come back—
It was gone before she could place it. The voice had the specific quality of something she should have recognized and couldn't—not because it was unfamiliar, but because the mechanism that would have identified it was the same one that had been removed.
She stood in the white and held the absence of recognition and felt something in her chest twist in response to a loss she couldn't name.
Outside the dimension, Jordan's hand covered his mouth.
F-boy, standing beside him in the imaginary city—the Honkai Beasts still flattened across the streets below, patiently waiting—cast a single look at him.
The look communicated, concisely and without elaboration, that Jordan had just done something careless.
"I know," Jordan said quietly.
His will had been hovering too close to the dimension's boundary—not inside it, but proximate enough that when a fragment of it had shifted toward Tatsumaki's consciousness, the thin membrane between external attention and internal intrusion had vibrated. The voice had gone through.
If Sirin had detected the source—if she'd realized that the outside was watching, that Jordan's spatial thread ran directly into her constructed space—she could have sealed the opening, cut the observation channel, worked in genuine isolation.
She hadn't detected it.
Jordan let out a careful breath and took a step back from the boundary.
Stay out, he reminded himself. This is hers.
He was still looking forward to the part where Sirin discovered she'd miscalculated. But that was secondary.
The white world was changing.
Tatsumaki heard it before she saw it—a sound that registered in her body rather than her ears, the deep mechanical thunder of material being assembled under pressure. Stone and steel and alloy arriving from nothing, falling like precipitation, clicking into place.
Walls.
Gray. High. The particular gray of poured concrete with reinforcement mesh visible at the edges. The kind of gray that didn't have warmth in it because warmth had been considered and rejected as a design element. Walls going up around her, a room taking shape, a ceiling descending.
And a floor that was already there—alloy plate, cold, the cold getting into her bare feet with the specific efficiency of a surface that was never warmed by anyone standing on it because the people who stood on it were not encouraged to stay long.
She knew this room.
Not the way you know something you've seen once. The way you know something that was your entire world for long enough that your body still knew it on sight.
The corridor beyond the iron bars was dark. The lab coat settled around her small shoulders like it had been tailored for this specific humiliation.
How is this—this doesn't exist anymore. This place burned. It's been years. It's—
The deep purple energy arrived without announcement.
She felt it at her feet first—a cold that was different from the floor's cold, a cold that was intentional—and by the time she looked down, the erosion had already climbed past her ankles, the corrupt Honkai patterns moving upward with the patient certainty of something that had learned to work on an incremental schedule.
Up her calves. Her knees. The lab coat doing nothing to stop it. The patterns reaching her waist and then her ribs, each one a corruption of the spatial authority the gem had contained, now deployed as a claim on the consciousness inside the lab.
Her thoughts were getting quieter.
Not loud grief—just the steady dimming of the cognitive lights, one by one, the way sleep arrives when you've been awake too long and have finally stopped fighting it.
From behind her, arms descended. White. Warm. The arms of something that had studied her carefully and decided that the thing she'd never had was the correct lever.
"Come back," the voice said. Gentle. Tender. The voice of something wearing the concept of maternal comfort the way a mask wears a face. "Come back, my child. You don't have to fight anymore."
The deep purple had reached her neck. Her face was lit in the wrong color.
And then:
The dimming stopped.
Not gradually. Not with effort.
Like a switch.
The laboratory appeared in the floor-to-ceiling window—her face in it, small and pale and drenched in purple light, the erosion patterns climbing toward her temples. She looked at herself. Really looked, with the specific, dispassionate assessment of a person who has been alone long enough to become honest about what they see in mirrors.
This is what I am.
Young. Powerless. Alone.
Yes. So?
The dead fish eyes had returned. Not as a defense—as a recognition. This was her, this had always been her, and the terror of seeing it didn't change the fact of it, and the fact of it didn't require her to collapse in response to it.
Her hands found her hips.
She tilted her head back, and the child-sized Tatsumaki looked up and backward at the figure with its arms around her—the beautiful, white-haired consciousness wearing warmth like a costume—with the specific expression of someone who has identified an error in an opponent's reasoning and is about to point it out.
"Hold on," she said. Her voice was entirely normal. "You've made a mistake."
The arms hesitated.
"You think that's a lever." She kept her eyes on the window-reflection, watching the manifested consciousness freeze behind her. "Family. Warmth. Someone to come home to."
A pause.
"I don't have those," she said. The statement was flat and factual, the tone of someone reading from a balance sheet. "I've never had them. I don't have a template for what you're offering, which means I can't be manipulated with it." She paused. "You studied the wrong thing."
In the silence that followed, something in the white dimension shifted—the subtle wrongness of a plan running off its expected track.
The white-haired consciousness—the face that had been arranged into serene maternal welcome—twitched.
The deep purple erupted.
All of it, simultaneously—every tendril that had been patient and incremental, the entire accumulation of Sirin's careful erosion work—abandoned the gradual approach and moved at once, converging on Tatsumaki's head with the focused desperation of someone who has realized their time is limited and is committing all remaining resources to a single decisive strike.
The erosion slammed into a wall.
Not a psychic wall—not the telekinesis that the white dimension had suppressed—something older and simpler. The wall that Tatsumaki had built at age four in a cold laboratory exactly like this one, and had been maintaining ever since, and had never once let anything through that she hadn't decided to let through.
Sirin pushed.
The wall did not move.
The child-sized Tatsumaki stood in the middle of the laboratory with the purple energy splashing against her from every direction and contained it with the same quality of effort she brought to holding a glass of water.
Stalemate.